 Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for our third and final installment in our three-day online briefing mini-series about coastal resilience and natural disaster recovery in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. On Tuesday, we convened Margarita Varela Rosa of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources and Ernesto Diaz with the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources to learn about federal support and local action. Yesterday, we continued with resilient housing and communities with Lori Shuman of Enterprise Community Partners and Arturo Masaldea, who chairs the Board of Directors of Casa Puebla. If you miss any of our online briefing mini-series so far, visit esi.org and click on Briefings and you can watch an archived webcast. And over the next few days, written summaries will also become available. Today, our topic is Sustainable Democratic Energy and Public Health, a topic that feels especially relevant given the events in the past several days and our present circumstances. I posted a web article at esi.org yesterday with some reflections on the need to address the scourges of racism, violence, and equality and injustice in order to meet the challenge of climate change. A major driver of our entire Coastal Resilience Briefing Series has been to help make room in policy discussions on Capitol Hill for marginalized voices, whether from Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Louisiana, Alaska, or any other part of the coastal country. These communities are most at risk, and in many cases, they are the first among us to be significantly impacted by climate change. We can help them tell their success stories of how they recovered from natural disasters, became more resilient, and met the social, economic, and environmental challenges of a warming world. When a Category 5 hurricane hits part of the United States, it is front page news and our awareness of these issues become more acute. And unfortunately, big storms like hurricanes, Irma, Maria, Barrel, and Dorian are becoming more frequent occurrence. But the in-between times are absolutely critical and so valuable. The challenge of improving the resilience of coastal communities is made so much harder because of the repeated need to refocus resources on recovery. As resilience gets better, recovery, following future severe weather events, should become more manageable. Unfortunately, there are people like our panelists today working in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands to facilitate the transition from a fossil fuel-powered energy system to cleaner renewable and distributed energy and help update hazard mitigation plans, and to do so justly with community involvement, incorporating the latest modeling and natural systems to improve resilience and doers, and strengthen them in a sustainable way. If you're joining us today for the first time, this week's online briefing mini series is the conclusion of an expensive year-long effort to tell the story of regional approaches to coastal resilience. This is the ninth region of focus, along with a week-long online briefing mini series about climate adaptation needs. If you'd like to catch up on coastal resilience, you can access briefing summaries and video recordings of all of our briefings at www.esa.org. And when you visit us online, just take a moment to sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter to learn about our other resilience initiatives, clean energy legislation, and of course, our briefing schedule. One final bit of logistics. Because we're once again online today, I cannot call on you if you have a question. So if you have a question for our panelists, please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. If you'd like, you can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org, and we'll draw from your questions submissions after we hear from our panelists. And speaking of panelists, our first is Ruth Santiago. Ruth is a community and environmental lawyer working with groups such as Al Puente, Latino Climate Action Network, and Comité de Logo Ambientale Incorporated, a grassroots environmental advocacy and watchdog organization in Sonia. She is part of a civil society initiative to promote solar communities and energy democracy called We Want Sun. In addition to litigation in courts and administrative agencies, Ruth has co-organized Environmental Education Project, advised the Hobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve on watershed protection and land use issues, and written extensively about environmental impacts of energy generation and environmental justice issues in Puerto Rico. She was the recipient in 2018 of the Sierra Club's Dr. Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award for Environmental Advocacy, Education Activist Work in Southeast Puerto Rico. She serves on the Earth Justice Board of Trustees, and has degrees from Lehigh University and Columbia University School of Law. Ruth, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you all for the invitation. I'm happy to be here, and I'm going to pull up my presentation shortly, and hopefully we can begin. Basically, I'd like to talk briefly about what we're doing here in Puerto Rico from the grassroots organizations that I'm especially affiliated with. I work with others as well. I think Dan mentioned the two main ones that are on the screen there. Getting right to it. You can see is basically the depiction of the trajectory of the hurricanes that we've had in the past hundred or so years here in Puerto Rico, and the brighter the color, basically, the more intense. The fuchsia one is, of course, Hurricane Maria that came in September of 2017. This is another map of Puerto Rico that indicates what our electric system looks like. Both the power plants, those are those numbers in the boxes around the map, and the blue lines, as you can see, are the transmission lines and systems, and the red also. There's also distribution lines in there. You can see that it's very elaborate, and basically you'll notice that the big plants, about 70% of the energy generation in Puerto Rico, is on the southern coast. A lot of it is being transmitted to the north, primarily to the San Juan metropolitan area where most of the energy demand is located in Puerto Rico. You all, I'm sure, are very familiar with the devastation that came about as a result of Hurricane Maria with the kind of transmission distribution system that we have here. Experts like the University of Puerto Rico faculty members and the Army Corps of Engineers estimated just widespread devastation to the transmission and distribution systems, which resulted in 100% power outage for, as you know, in some cases, many months, up to 10 months in some places in Puerto Rico. And it was accompanied by a communication failure because a lot of the telecommunications were actually piggybacking on the transmission and distribution system here. And so what people did just to at least have some minimal energy supply while this system was being repaired was to use, in some cases, those who could afford it, diesel power generators, which were obviously not the solution. Actually, some people were intoxicated by the fumes. There was a shortage of diesel fuel and all kinds of logistical complications were bringing in both the generators, the fuel, and parts and repairs and things like that. And so ultimately, this all resulted in immense human suffering and death. But I guess we can say that at least one lesson learned from Hurricane Maria is that communities need to be involved, need to be active participants in energy issues here in Puerto Rico and I'm sure elsewhere. So giving a little more background on the kind of system that we have, these are photographs of some of the major plants that we saw on the map earlier. And as you can see, there are central stations, fossil fuel-based plants. The one on the right is especially problematic. It's called the AES coal burning power plant, applied energy systems out of Arlington, Virginia, generates about 17 to 20% of the energy supply here, burning coal that's brought in from Colombia, South America. But then islands traditionally have generated energy burning oil and that's actually less the case nowadays, at least here in Puerto Rico, but those are the oil burning power plants. So this is the energy mix. So we have, surprisingly, most people are not aware that the residual oil and the diesel have now taken a second place to the so-called natural gas or methane burning for power generation. As you can see, natural gas has now taken first place. It's the biggest fuel source in Puerto Rico right now. And unfortunately, as you can see, and these numbers are rounded out, but renewables are about 2.3 or 2.5% of the energy mix, surprisingly, shockingly on this island here with so much sun. So this is a close-up of one of the externalities related to the AES coal burning power plant. This is actually a mountain of coal ash waste that AES has stored on its plant site. And what we've discovered is that coal ash waste is actually leaching the heavy metals into the groundwater, into what is known as the South Coast aquifer, and this is documented. It's on AES's webpage. They have actually contaminated the South Coast aquifer with the heavy metals from that coal ash waste because they have no disposal facility for it. And so what do we do with this very problematic system we have in Puerto Rico that does not really serve the public interest when it comes not just to hurricanes and disasters, but just on a day-to-day basis. We're seeing so many outages and so much unreliability in the system. So we're participating with quite a few of the groups that I'm working with on a process before the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau called the Integrated Resource Plan. And as most of you probably are aware, that's a process for developing the electric system, in this case in Puerto Rico for 20 years. And so we're very actively participating in that. And the major question is, do we rebuild the existing system, especially after the hurricanes, and especially because we're expecting that FEMA, at some point, will provide some funding for the recovery efforts in Puerto Rico? And our answer and our response to that is absolutely not. We do not rebuild the same system. And we have a civil society proposal, which, as Dan mentioned, is called We Want Sun, Get Him or Sol is Spanish, of course, term for it. And the website is available both in English and in Spanish on the website. And we invite you to take a look on the web page and try to see what it's about. We're basically proposing a combination of measures that include energy efficiency, demand response programs, battery energy storage systems, and rooftop solar, especially as key, and energy literacy, so that people can become involved, as we mentioned. And so this is really much more beyond technology. We're talking about sustainable energy through community, neutral aid, and PREPA transformation. PREPA is the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. It's a public corporation that needs to be seriously transformed in terms of its governance and being more representative of the interests on the island, what communities would want to see in terms of the transformation of the electric system and allow for community participation and what are known as prosumers, right? Producers and consumers of energy, especially at the residential level here. We're calling for solar communities, which would have so many benefits in terms of the local economy, in terms of the multiplier effect of doing large-scale rooftop renewables, battery energy storage systems, energy efficiency. It would be much better than exporting billions of dollars per year for the purchase of fossil fuels or for investments in central station fossil plants. And it would provide some measure of environmental justice to communities that are close to these existing power plants and adjust transition for the workers at the PREPA plants so that they can participate in the transformation of the electric system as well. And so we always get the question about, well, is it affordable? And we have found, and actually not just that we have found, but in the draft integrated research plan that's currently being considered by the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, there is a definite statement that rooftop solar customer, what they call customer-cited solar, is definitely more cost-effective than any of the preferred plans that the PREPA current administration is proposing. And it's also technically viable to provide all of the energy needs of Puerto Rico, especially when we incorporate best and power electronics and other items. Okay, so unfortunately, though, what we're seeing right now is a so-called, what is called a transition using LNG or liquefied natural gas or methane gas. And there's been just an attempt to flood Puerto Rico with this natural gas, which is likely to be fracked gas from the U.S. And there are a number of very powerful forces here trying to influence this transition and trying to achieve this transition rather than going to the actual energy democracy proposal that is represented in Kiremosol and allowing communities to be prosumers, not just passive consumers of energy. And one of the main companies involved here is New Fortress Energy. They've incorporated this energy here. And in the photographs, you'll see that they are converting the San Juan power plant to burn gas. And you'll note that we already mentioned that natural gas, the so-called natural gas, is already the largest source of energy generation in Puerto Rico. And so we don't need it for diversity, field diversity purposes, and we don't need to do the transition because we know that rooftop solar is viable and both technically and economically. And so this was the initial proposal in the integrated resource plan. Again, a so-called transition with natural gas, but there is so much infrastructure involved that it would really just totally displace the possibility of any real advancing of the renewable energy goals and standards here in Puerto Rico. So what you see and some of these projects are still being seriously considered by the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau and they involve onshore LNG operations and also three new offshore or marine-based LNG operations and possibly even converting the AES coal burning power plant to burn gas. And various new combined cycle plants. So just overdoing the construction of new plants and infrastructure to burn gas, basically. And I'll finish up with this photo, which is basically right after the hurricane, Hurricane Maria in 2017. This was actually a helicopter placing a transmission tower in the mountainous area. Puerto Rico, like much of the Caribbean, is a mountain range, basically surrounded by a narrow coastal plain. And PREPA on its web page boasts that it was a leader in the placing of transmission and distribution systems in these rugged territories and terrain. And we believe that now that there are other alternatives, that should be the route and the direction rather than redoing this difficult kind of operation. So thank you. Thank you so much, Ruth. Sorry about that little bit of delay there. I was disconnected and had to come back in. Sorry about that, but that was a really excellent presentation. And I think that photo is pretty... In one way, it's a very impressive photo because that's a flying machine putting a transmission tower in the ground. In another way, it's a bit of an unfortunate photo because it doesn't necessarily look toward the future. But thanks for a wonderful presentation. If any of you missed any of Ruth's wonderful presentation, just a quick reminder that everything will be archived at esi.org. And if you relate to join us, just a quick reminder about how we're going to deal with questions, my colleague Ellen Vaughn will kick off the Q&A session after our next panelist. If you have any questions from out there in the audience, please follow us on Twitter at ESI online. And you can send us some questions that way. You can also send us an email, esi at esi.org. And we'll do our best to get all of your questions in the mix when we get to Q&A. Our next panelist is Dr. Greg Onell. Greg is the director of the Caribbean Green Technology Center at the University of the Virgin Islands, where he is co-leading the update of the Hazard Mitigation Plan for the Territory. He is also developing a green infrastructure database to create a series of options for climate adaptation of coastal areas. Greg started his career as a coastal engineer and he has advanced degrees from the Ecole Supérieure de Trevaux public in Paris, Texas A&M University, and Oregon State University. And with that, Greg, I welcome you to our panel today. Thank you so much for joining us. And really, I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to talk about the Hazard Mitigation Plan for the Virgin Islands in the Subdust Land Show. So I'm going to make this presentation on behalf of the entire team, which is composed of a fair amount of people and talent. And this is a project that the University of the Virgin Island UVI is doing in coordination and collaboration with the Virgin Island Territory Emergency Management Agency, VITIMA. So as Ruth just mentioned in her presentation and you very well know, the Virgin Islands was impacted by two hurricanes in 2017 that were two weeks apart. So it was a bit of a crazy time. Both islands, the three islands that composed the territories of Thomas St. John and St. Croix, as well as the Water Island, which is a small island of St. Thomas, who were all impacted by the hurricane. And you can see some of those impacts in this picture here. So following this hurricane, there was also a sense that this is one of many different type of hazards that can really impact us here in the territory. We have earthquakes that can trigger tsunamis and we had tsunamis in the past. We also can suffer from landslides during rain or during earthquakes. The hurricanes that Ruth mentioned about and that, you know, you saw some pictures of, but we also have droughts, we're in the middle of a drought right now in the Virgin Islands. And then with all that, there's climate change that is making the hurricane stronger, the droughts longer, and sea level is rising, which leads to this picture here on the right of almost flooding of some of the infrastructure during a sunny day. And that is due to wave action that we believe is being amplified by the fact that the seas are higher than they should be. So this is a bit of a historical perspective of, you know, minor events, major events, and years where we had more than one event, not comprehensive, but I think we did our best to sort of capture some of those events that made it to the books of history. And as you can see, there's been an acceleration since the 70s of, you know, multiple events happening this same year. And there are many reasons for that. One of it is better, you know, record keeping, but there are others such as climate change that is increasing the frequency of those events, but also land use practices. And I will get back to that in a minute. So there has a mitigation plan for those who are not familiar. It is a document that is mandated for all states and territory to have. It has to be updated every five years. We just updated our territorial plan, but we are now working on this new plan because we're taking a bit longer instead of the sort of usual six months we're taking to three years to work on it. This makes the states and territory eligible for BRIC, which is basically pre-migration, pre-disaster funding, but also post-disaster mitigation funding. When something happens, you can have access to some type of funding to help fix what was broken. The plan is also an opportunity for us to create public support for existing, but also future risk reduction initiatives. And it's also a vision for the development of the territory. And really sort of bring forth those concepts of resilience and sustainability. So in the past, most has a mitigation plan or HMP is really focused on things, on infrastructure, energy, transportation, communication, infrastructure, etc. And that's important. We need those. We need those building. We need this infrastructure to have access to those services. However, the hurricane sort of brought different lessons that sort of made us we think this, you know, so focused on infrastructure. The first one is that as you saw in a picture earlier, we've been suffering from more and more disasters since the 70s. And some of it, like I said, is due to better record keeping, climate change. But some of it is also due to the fact that we have developed quite a lot. So you know, left hand side, you see a picture of the territory, St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix in 1985. And what you see is right now, we've developed quite a lot of all of the islands, even St. John, which is mostly a national park, you see encroachment as much as possible on the boundaries of the park. And St. Croix here also experience a fair amount of development. So people live in more places than before. So then an event that happened in the past now can become a disaster because they start to So if we looked at some stats that we're starting to develop based on the analysis that we do, and we see that there's more than a quarter of the buildings are in a flood zone or tsunami zone, more than 45% of government building, police, firefighters, clinics, hospital, all the public safety and health building are also in flood and tsunami zone. And we also are seeing that more than 40% of all the buildings are in extremely high wind zone. So we are suffering, we can suffer everywhere on the island from the impact of hurricane wind storms, but some places because of a topography suffer from stronger winds, and nearly half of those buildings are in those spaces. So, you know, as you can see, a lot of our assets are in hazardous zone, and we cannot really, you know, pretend that we're going to move them or anything like that, because we are finding out land, we are dealing with a final amount of land. So really the question is how can we sort of rethink our land use practices to not encourage more of the same, but also how to deal with what we have. And what we have is actually good, a lot of good things. So we are working with some social scientists to try to understand our community and to try to understand this concept of community resilience. Like I said, in the past, we tend to focus on things a lot, buying this, installing that, building this, but we tend to forget people. And what we are finding is that we, Virgin Islanders, we are very agile. We are a question to live through many disruption. As you saw in the figure that I show at the beginning of this talk, there's been a lot of events in the past 40 to 50 years. And so we know how to live with disruption. And outside of those events, we have as Puerto Rico is also experiencing regular power outage, regular disruption in just normal service delivery. So we have built ways to deal with this. We are also compassionate, and we help each other during times of hardships as the picture shows, the sort of alliance and the help that St. Corp provided to St. Thomas, but islands provide to other islands and people help each other because we know that we only have us who we cannot really wait for somebody else to come within 24 hours. But what we're also finding beside all those very positive traits is that there are people who are suffering and there are communities that are very, very vulnerable. And sometimes it's not very visible because we have a culture of positivity and culture of kendo. Sometimes we tend to hide our difficulties and hardships, which make it difficult to really sort of understand the depth of the issues. We're also finding that the social networks can sometimes feel exclusive. Sometimes it's who you know, sort of type of social network to get access to help. And some of the organization have blind spots because there is not a very thorough accounting of all the different communities that are in the Virgin Islands. Because we have people from pretty much every single island in the Caribbean, different type of language, plus people from the States and other parts of the world. So it's a very, very diverse community. And so sometimes it's hard to think about, okay, who are those who really need help. And the other piece is that what we're finding is that non-profits and non-governmental organizations are sometimes not brought to the table in sort of pre-disaster sort of period when we sort of put in place the preparedness and sort of really think about non-communication. The government, for good reason, is leading the charge. But we're also finding that there should be a bit more involvement of those non-profits. So in a way what we're finding is that the social infrastructure is really vital for risk reduction. And we need to think about, you know, how to engage and how to best empower social infrastructure, you know, as we start to think about as a mitigation planet. The other piece, and that was also recorded in Ruth's talk when she talked about, you know, relying on solar power instead of fossil fuel, is natural infrastructure is really actually has a role to play during disasters. They are not only the foundation of our economy, because most of our economy is based on tourism. So the natural beauty and the quality of environment is really important for our economy. And without a solid economy, we don't have any type of resilience. If we don't have economic resilience, if we cannot get our economy going, you know, quickly after a major disruption, there can be some very long and negative consequences. So really thinking about our natural systems as a foundation for our economy, but also they can be life-saving. As you can see in this picture, you know, we get water from nature. We get water from the aquifers. We get water from things that don't require technologies that can break sometimes. And so the issue, and you saw that in the sort of history of development of the VI is that the development is degrading the quality and the health of our natural system. And so the benefits that we are deriving from this are being lost as we are paving over our sources of water, our sources of fresh air, etc. And we are also losing the sort of cultural attachment to this natural system. And the loss of cultural identity can sometimes lead to a longer term, a longer recovery than maybe could have been achieved with a society that can relate to different facets of its identity, in this case, using the natural system. So really the natural infrastructure that we have is degrading in the VI through our loss. But we also are thinking about how to integrate it within the hazard mitigation plan. And we are going through an exercise right now of really quantifying all those benefits beyond the sort of well-known sort of storm surge reduction type, you know, discussion to really sort of talking about, you know, food and water and all this provision of very important services, temperature reduction, etc., etc. So we can integrate those into the long-term mitigation strategies. So this figure, which is from the National Institute of Standard and Technology in NIST, is what we sort of really sort of gravitate towards, which is really thinking about critical infrastructure things as a way to support our way of living, to support what matters to us, education, health, family, government, etc., etc. It's not an end of itself, but it's a means for society to function, because ultimately what we want to do is really sort of make clear that the first community in a VI resilience and building resilience practices and having resilience is really about what we do, what we do with what we have and what we do with, you know, outside of what we have. But it's definitely not what we have. We cannot just rely on infrastructure to say, okay, we're going to have it. In this example, you know, we have a house with solar power and this is great. They have, you know, a redundant system for access to energy, but at the same time, they have developed to develop practices so that when they tap into this external source of power, they don't overload it. But they also realize that, you know, when they turn the button for this or that, things are actually working, or that this system is well maintained, well installed, etc., because what we saw after the storm is a lot of people who had solar power could not rely on them because they weren't familiar with their system, because of the weather system was designed, and because of practices that they did not develop as they were installing the system. On the other picture, where it's a picture of a recovery effort to fix one of the areas that suffered from landslide post hurricane, the question that we are asking is, okay, now that you have this infrastructure, what are you going to do to maintain it? What are you going to do to ensure that it doesn't degrade, that it becomes part of your sort of day-to-day operation, that you really integrate into what you have and make sure that, you know, moving forward, it doesn't degrade, but also you can rely on it as an asset. And that goes for all type of infrastructure. And the dialogue that we have then is really sort of integrating of some of the concepts that I mentioned earlier of, okay, how are we working as a society? How are we working as an agency, working with a different one to ensure that things are moving smoothly? So the question that we are asking moving forward when we start to talk about resiliency is, you know, where is the risk? What is the risk? And what is at risk? And to really try to figure out a solution that really increases resilience in a strategic way, rather than just, you know, massive purchases of things or investment infrastructure that at the end might put us more in danger or not really change our situation. And the last question is really a question that we are asking ourselves constantly is, okay, as we're moving forward, is our economy resilient? Are we ensuring that, you know, we have the means to pay for it? But at the same time, what we do really increases our ability to have a strong economy. Because without a strong economy, we cannot do anything of those risk reduction strategies that we really want to put in place. So this figure here sort of summarize our sort of philosophy for all the work that we are currently doing, which is really investing in social systems, because of the strength that they have, the role that they played, you know, for disaster risk reduction, but also do recovery, if those strengths, if those networks are strong enough, and really sort of how do we operate? How do people know, how do people, you know, work with what they have and how can we increase that because of the importance of maintaining, but also working among agencies, deworking among, you know, different across different networks to ensure that, you know, those investments really go a long way. We're also thinking about the natural systems, like I mentioned, and also thinking about just, you know, is our environment strong? Are the buildings strong enough? You know, are they well placed? What does that mean if they are placed in the flood zone? And at the end of the day, really looking at the intersection between all those different systems to try to find as many win-win solution, as many sort of solution and strategies that really maximize the benefits and the strength of all those different networks. So this last slide here sort of summarizes the different type of works that we're doing. Like I said, I'm talking for a larger team of colleagues and contractors, where we are engaging with the public, engaging with different stakeholders to really understand what's going on, understand some of the points that are made about the strength and the weaknesses of different type of sectors. But we are also doing the hard analysis of, you know, understanding the hazards, their impact, understanding the, you know, the natural environment around us to do a strong risk assessment, but also sustainability analysis to ensure that moving forward, you know, we are keeping our assets in check so that, you know, we can rely on them when things go wrong. So based on that, so we're still in this process, we're probably going to spend the probably the next six months finalizing this first section of our work. And then we're going to start to move into those litigation strategies that I mentioned, really thinking about this question of resilience, this question of operation, this question of ensuring that what we do is part of resilience as much as what we have. And all of those components will end up in the hazard mitigation and resilience. So we expect to have this plan by the end of next year, hoping I can give you an update to all the different components that, you know, the strategies that this plan will have. But we are really hoping that it will be a comprehensive view of, you know, how to tackle risk reduction in a place that is, you know, isolated, but has a lot of strength that, you know, I think sometimes in the past we didn't rely on as much as we could. Thank you so much. Thanks, Greg. That was a great presentation, really appreciated all of your commentary on what resilience means and looking beyond sort of the obvious. Now is the time we're going to move to Q&A. If you have questions out there in our audience, you can send them to us using Twitter. You can follow us online at EESI. You can follow us online at EESI online. If you would prefer to just send us an email, you can do that too. The email address to use is EESI at EESI.org. My colleague Ellen Vaughn is joining us and she is going to kick off and lead the Q&A. And I'll turn it over to her. Thanks, Ellen. Great. Thanks, Dan. And thank you, Greg and Ruth, so much for your very insightful presentations. Greg, thank you. I'm going to go back to Ruth first for a couple of questions. Ruth, it was fascinating learning more about the energy infrastructure and the energy sources in Puerto Rico. And first of all, thank you for all the work that you're doing on behalf of communities and health. It's so important. I wonder if you could talk about federal energy policies and how Congress could help the islands utilize more of the indigenous energy resources that you talked about. Sure. So here in Puerto Rico, as in most of the Caribbean islands, we don't have any fossil fuels that we know of and certainly nothing that's being developed. But what we do have is an abundance of sun, especially. And about over 10 years ago, the Department of Energy commissioned this study to the son of the faculty at the University of Puerto Rico. And they developed a study called the Achieveable Renewable Energy Targets, ARIT study, in which they basically recommend that the Puerto Rico electric system be developed using primarily rooftop solar installations because we happen to have in addition to that all of that solar resource, we also have lots of built up areas of sprawling, built up development in Puerto Rico. And they actually call it the rooftop resource and recommend that it be used as opposed to using very scarce land areas. So as we mentioned, we have a very narrow coast of plain and a lot of it has already been built up. And in order to have some food security, we need to preserve certain areas for agriculture and ecologically sensitive areas so that we don't see the kind of flooding and disastrous situations that Greg was indicating in his slides. And so basically, we would hope that Congress would implement policies and programs, facilitate programs that would allow Puerto Rico to implement the recommendations in that ARIT study, which are by the way just incorporated in our get a more certain proposal, though we want some proposal that I mentioned during my presentation. And of course, that would be coupled with battery energy storage systems, because as Greg mentioned, many of the systems after the hurricanes here in Puerto Rico, at least, many of them did not have the battery energy storage systems. And so they were not very helpful, because there was no way to store the energy that was taken up by the panels. And of course, we need energy efficiency programs, we need demand response time of use, all kinds of alternatives, and energy education. Right. And so the people actually know how they can make the best use of the energy that would be available. Thank you. That's very interesting. And I'm so glad you mentioned energy efficiency. You took the words right out of my mouth, another resource that we that that we need to tap into very valuable. So and that's also interesting with the, you know, the geography with topography, very important point about preserving land for food, but also the natural infrastructure that Greg talked about. Because I was going to ask about wind, I know that you have trade winds and it seemed like and I know there has been wind energy development, but maybe just kind of follow up on that a little bit. Maybe people are curious about the potential there or the barriers for wind energy technology. Sure. Yeah. Well, so far what we've seen in terms of the studies that have been done about wind potential surprisingly in Puerto Rico is not as it's certainly nowhere near the abundance of a solar. And we have what we've seen is that on the eastern coast, there is some potential for wind farm done. In fact, there was a wind farm on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico that was actually taken out by Hurricane Maria, and it has not been rebuilt. And so I would think that basically we need to rely and also for reasons of transmission and distribution infrastructure on site solar, it seems to be a better option because the sort of utility scale projects require lots of investments with substations and transmission distribution and why do that when we can do the direct power generation on using the rooftops? Interesting. Yes. Thank you. Appreciate that. And so I'm going to give you a break and I'm going to bounce over to Greg for a minute. Greg, thank you so much for your presentation and letting us know more about the hazard mitigation plan and why that's valuable and how that can also then free up some of this funding. That's so important. So you had talked about the value of natural infrastructure. And I think we all know that at some level, but really in terms of the foundation of the island economy and then how natural systems are under threat, are there projects to restore natural systems that can be eligible for or FEMA funding, for BRIC funding, the building resilient infrastructure and communities funding, for example? Yeah. There are a few. I'm not familiar with all the projects that have been submitted. I know that there's been a few projects that were submitted related to restoring some of the mangroves and restoring some of the reefs. I've also heard some projects related to replenishing some of the aquifers, so restoring some green spaces for aquifer and aquifer recharge. I think what we are trying to look at with the hazard mitigation is going back to this question of what is at risk? Where is the risk? To be able to better articulate why we are doing some of this restoration. So I'm a coastal engineer, for example, and a lot of the discussion about mangroves and coral has to do with coastal risk reduction in terms of wave attenuation or storm surge reduction. Well, we don't really have the amount that really would make a difference during the category 5 hurricane. We don't have the everglades, we don't have the grid barrier reef and the quality of the environment and the degradation of the system is such that it would take a very long time to get there. However, there are other types of benefits that can be looked at from stormwater filtration, stormwater retention, fisheries, again access to food after disasters is critical. So if you have strong fisheries and fisheries practices, you can maybe a few months after a storm start to resume some of those activities. Same thing with potentially farming. We are still looking on this. We have a colleague who is coming on board to spend his time on the fish and ag sector to sort of be able to articulate different type of restoration activities, the benefits on different angles so that we can really sort of have a comprehensive view of what we are getting with those and then start the education and the outreach about why it's so important to look at it in a varied way. Because my fear sometimes is if we just focus on one thing such as storm surge reduction or wave attenuation, when it fails, then people will look for the next thing because you saw them a solution that in their eye didn't deliver. What we're making an argument for is that there's more than one way to repair ecosystem services. Great. Yeah, thank you. And that makes me think also, so all those values, all those benefits, there are multiple benefits from these systems. Do you find that we have the right tools for benefit cost analysis to take those things into account, not to mention the effects of climate change? I think that it's, there's two ways of answering this question. Sometimes the tools, so there is a question of tools that there's also a question of policy and ways that you use those tools for the question that you are asking. So in terms of tools, I think that it depends when it comes to wave and storm surge reduction. I think that we still have a bit of a ways to go. There are still a fair amount of scientific basic questions that need to be answered when it comes to the ability of the system to reduce storm surge, for example. But I think that when it comes to groundwater recharge or maybe some ag or other type of benefits or even temperature reduction, I believe that there are more tools available to make some of those quantifications. But I think in general we're getting there. I would say, I mean, I'm not an expert on everything related to ecosystem services, but at least I would say that the last 20 years there's been this massive investment. So compared to other tools, it's relatively young, but at the same time we've known a lot of things for a long time. So there are tools that give some level of answers for different questions. I think the one of the other barrier is the way that you look at what is important for your society. And what we're finding is that there is a lot of emphasis on built infrastructure. And the reason why I'm in the point that the natural resources are important for our economy is because when we look at the type of funding, you know, post disaster, it's all about rebuilding infrastructure, which is extremely important. We need the roads, we need the phones, we need the power. But at the same time, if we don't have the beaches, if we don't have a place for people to actually go and have a vacation because our economy is so dependent on tourism, then we are not able to rebound. If we don't make those investments, we're not able to rebound. And if we continue to build the way that we have in the past and lose all of those natural systems, then we start to lose our freshwater, we start to lose our temperature moderation, et cetera. And so then we turn into things and infrastructure that put us more, what's the term, we make us more dependent on that infrastructure. And so we have to invest more in more infrastructure. We have to maintain more infrastructure and now be afraid of more infrastructure being broken if a hurricane's, you know, or something like that happens. So I think that there is a question of science and tools in terms of modeling and coming up with the answers that make you comfortable to make a decision. But I think there's also a question of how do we look at development? How do we view growth? And how do we place natural infrastructure in this discussion about growth and economic development and peer development? Right, absolutely. So thinking about those, not just the tools, but how are those tools incorporated into the context? Yes, yes. And yeah, and really looking holistically at all the systems together. Thank you. I'm going to bounce it to Dan. I think there might be audience questions at this time. Yeah, we do. We have, this is more of a clarification question, Greg, for you. And then we'll have a sort of a conclusion question first to think about before we wrap up because we're getting close. The question is about your hazard mitigation plan and your plan for BRIC funding. One of our audience members understood you to say that the plan was required for BRIC funding, but the plan would then not be ready until next year. And the clarifying question is, does that mean that the US Virgin Islands will not be able to apply to BRIC until the report is done? No, so maybe I didn't explain this well. Hazard mitigation plan in general would make states and territories eligible for BRIC funding. We do have a hazard mitigation plan in place because without it, we would be in trouble. So we are updating that plan. Okay, so the update is what's going to be through next year, but until then, there's still one question. Okay, great. Thanks for that. We're getting close to four o'clock. Yesterday we heard we had two wonderful speakers and they mentioned that yesterday was the third day of this year's Atlantic hurricane season. Today is the fourth of June, the fourth day of the season. I'm wondering, obviously I hope that there aren't any nasty storms that come your way this year. As you're on the fourth day of this year's hurricane season, I'm wondering if you could each share a few thoughts about how your work or the work of the islands in general has better prepared your communities to sort of make it through this hurricane season, hopefully avoiding the kinds of disruptions and the kinds of devastation that you've seen before. However your resilience efforts, Justin's Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, better prepared you for this year's hurricane season. Ruth, maybe we'll start with you for a couple concluding thoughts and then we'll wrap with you, Greg. I think you may be on mute, Ruth. I failed in technology, obviously, so a lot of the organizations that I work with have done sort of resiliency community level resiliency centers and they're doing just in every essential aspect of life are working on projects which would make their respective communities better able to withstand and recover and do well as can be expected after another natural event. That basically means some reconstruction work to housing units on a community mutual aid basis. As you know, rooftop solar, the community centers, water filtering, things like that, communications improvement. They've been throughout Puerto Rico quite a few projects at mostly at community centers, at hospitals, at schools that have started to prepare in that way and created sort of community hubs for resilience. Thanks. Greg, from your perspective in the Virgin Islands, how are you feeling the island has prepared itself over the last couple years since those horrible storms? So I would like to first say that there is still a fair amount of anxiety in the community because it was very traumatic. That being said, I think we have some sense of confidence. We, like I said, it's nice to think about the government is doing great work in terms of moving forward projects. So I think some of our infrastructure is stronger. We have better buildings. Sometimes we also have better electrical poles, etc. But I think so. So that's a good thing that makes us in a better position. But I also think that there is stronger ties within the community. And that goes back to what I was saying during my presentation, which is really starting time understanding the strength and areas where communities, more investment in communities would help. Because I think that there are stronger ties within the communities. There is a sense of, okay, we've done it before, it's not fun at all. But we know we can rely on each other, which I think is extremely, extremely important. Sometimes I think it's more important than having our 124-hour basis. And I think also from my point of view, a better appreciation for the services and the benefits that nature provides us and really sort of think about, you know, planting gardens and really understand ways that we can build resilience at the household level with what is around us, from solar power to food to water security, etc., etc. That's great. And a stronger community, more resilient community, I can't think of two better notes to end today's panel on, as well as the entire briefing mini-series of the week. Ruth and Greg, thank you so much for joining us and being part of our briefing mini-series this week. Thanks to everyone on the ESI team, Alan Omer. You heard Omer earlier. He doesn't always get to participate in the webinars. But you heard his voice today. That wasn't me. Daniel, Brian, Anna, Amber, Sidney, our intern class, our summer intern class, Bridget and Abby and Maeve and Bridget. Thank you so much. And Maya, thank you so much for all of your efforts this week. All of our materials available online, www.esa.org. If you have a few moments to take our survey, Omery put the link up. It would be great to hear what you thought about today. Great to hear what you thought about the week in general. We've been doing more of these mini-series of multiple, shorter online briefings. At some point we'll go back to doing them in person, but for right now, love to hear how you think we're doing with respect to our online briefing offering. If you have a moment, it means a lot to us. Thanks so much. And we'll go ahead and end it there. I hope everyone has a great rest of the week and I hope everyone is getting ready for the weekend and reflecting on the events of the last couple of days and thinking about ways that we can do better and hopefully move past some of the difficulties in our societies that are creating these sort of awful instances of injustice and equality. So we'll go ahead and end it there. Thanks so much and take care.